Consequences of Brain Science

Special issue on ToM

The new issue (number 3-4, September-December 2006) of Social Neuroscience is a hefty double issue tome dedicated to the topic of Theory of Mind. It contains 20 papers by several of the leaders in the field, and is edited by Rebecca Saxe and Simon Baron-Cohen. One of the reasons for the enduring interest in ToM is that, in contrast to other capacities for social reasoning – for instance, the ability to represent facial features or the intentional motion of conspecifics’ bodies – the ability to reason about the contents of mental states may be an unique human ability (see, e.g., [1]). Recently, through fMRI research, ToM has been linked to a specific part of the human brain: the right temporo-parietal junction.